Abstract:

Social media users increased by 227 million over 2021, reaching a total of 4.7 billion at the beginning of July 2022. Current trends indicate that two-thirds of the world's total population will be online by July 2023, and the number of social network users will be the equivalent of 60% of the world's population.

In recent decades, new technologies and social media have caused a real revolution in traditional teaching methods, driving new teacher-student channels such as social networks, video platforms or online courses and tutorials. Not only have the channels and technology changed, but the role of teachers has also evolved, and influencers have been gaining importance with a high acceptance by students. Channels dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge such as YouTube have increased exponentially in recent years and, in this vein, it is critical to research on the influencers phenomenon in order to better understand the trends and upcoming challenges.

Influencers are people who have achieved a large number of followers in their social networks gaining a great prestige among young people thanks to being experts in a certain subject and with the ability to impact with their content. Instagram continues being the network where most influencers are followed, closely followed by Youtube and in third place at the same level: Facebook, Tiktok and Twitter. The number of influencers sharing educational resources and using their accounts to produce educational content is increasing but not all of them generate the same credibility to their followers. According to Ohanian's Source Credibility Model (SCM) of Ohanian (1990), the central axes of influencers’ impact are Trust, Experience and Attractiveness of their resources.

The purpose of this article is to define, analyze and contextualize the new role of the educational influencer and its relationship with trust. In order to accomplish this, authors propose a new model of influencers’ trust based on the study published by Mayer et al., (1995) on trust, which is the most cited and prestigious in the academic literature and will be the core of our proposal. According to Mayer et al. (1995) the factors that conform the reliability of the depository are three: ability, benevolence and integrity. Mayer et al. (1995) also propose that these three characteristics, in addition to supporting perceived reliability (in the depository), will also be the antecedents of trust. Thus, we find in this model that the decision to trust or not to trust someone will be based on the judgment of these three characteristics: the ability, benevolence and integrity of that person.

Among the main conclusions, it is highlighted that the phenomenon of influencers should also be taken into account in the education, since an increasing number of students are choosing digital channels such as YouTube to learn. Finally in our work we consider the implications of the rise of influencers in education and discuss future paths of research responding to the challenges of the new era.

Keywords:

Influencers, education, leadership, trust, social media, youtube, technology, entrepreneurship.